


Haunting Ben

by ghoulbian (rowdyclub)



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Diego is a good bro, Hurt/Comfort, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-06 18:20:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17944763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rowdyclub/pseuds/ghoulbian
Summary: “I didn’t mean it that way, don’t- stop looking at me like that. I only mean we’ve all allowed ourselves to grieve. You assumed that you’d see him again, so you never… I haven’t even seen you cry. It’s not healthy.”________Klaus waited to see Ben after Ben dies. Diego waited with Klaus.





	Haunting Ben

The crickets are a symphony. An orchestra that rose like steam in a shower up into the oily black expanse of the sky. The stars are blotted out by the city lights, only a few brighter pinpricks from planets left pulsing persistently on. I raised my head up, elbows stained green, thought about saying something like “Ben liked the stars. We should have left his ashes in the country,” but didn’t, because there wasn’t anything that could be done about it. 

Diego had been slumped against the courtyard bench for the better part of an hour, his eyes half-lidded, sometimes studying the ground and sometimes watching me emptily. My brother and I had been sneaking out to the courtyard for months. Early September was still drunk on summer, heat lingering long after the sun had set. 

I was waiting for Ben, and Diego was waiting for me. He was here for the same reason he peeled worms off of the hot pavement to save them from frying when he thought that no one was looking. 

There was nostalgia to it. Memories of Diego with the morning sun glowing in his hair, his scuffed shoes kicking the table leg and sending ripples into everyone’s cup of coffee or apple juice. Sometimes I traced my thumb carefully over the carvings he made into the grooves on the dining room table. The memories had started to fade, blending into the blue-ish dim tone of him under lunar light. He moved out before Ben had even died. The first to leave. _Ten little Soldier boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine._

“See anything, Klaus?” Asked Diego, softly and yet too loud at the same time. 

“No,” I admitted, my head thumping back into the grass. I was lying somewhere near where we had poured his ashes. 

_Perhaps if he had waited..._

But we’d been waiting for hours. We had been waiting for months. 

“Klaus, man…” _Don’t,_ I wanted to protest, but didn’t. “Maybe it’s time you- I mean, we-” 

_Moved on._

“I didn’t mean it that way, don’t- stop looking at me like that. I only mean we’ve all allowed ourselves to grieve. You assumed that you’d see him again, so you never… I haven’t even seen you cry. It’s not healthy.” 

The sigh tacked to the end sounded like the stirring of leaves in the wind. 

“I want a cigarette,” I replied, ‘drop it’ echoing behind the words like a phantom. 

“You said you’d quit,” Diego said, in a tone that suggested that he knew he was being baited and that he was simply humoring me for the moment. 

My toes, black nail polish chipping, curled into the dirt under me. My jaw jutted upwards towards the moon. 

“I was lying,” A smile stretched my lips too tight. “You know I was lying.” 

Because I was a haunted house with cracked windows and nosiness was a family trait. 

“I like giving you the benefit of the doubt.” 

The sun was going to rise soon, and then Diego would disappear into the low hanging morning fog. It would be like he was never there. As if he had never existed in this place. I would stay as he left with that cigarette I said I was going to quit and watch the smoke curl into the first pale rays of the sun. I wouldn’t watch him leave, and I wouldn’t stare at the way Ben’s statue gleamed and held the light captive. I would grind the cigarette into the concrete when I heard mom start to flit about the kitchen so she wouldn’t know that I had picked up smoking again even though I knew she had spied the pills the last time she cleaned my room. It was a system. 

“Do you remember the day you left?” 

“No,” Diego lied, which was essentially a yes because he knew that I knew that he was lying. 

“You didn’t say goodbye.” 

“I didn’t need to. I’m here now.” 

“Yeah,” I exhaled. “Ben didn’t say goodbye.”

“Okay, Klaus. Okay,” And that meant I had won. 

Diego settled back against the bench the way a car settles, tension building and then releasing all at once with the sound of his knee’s popping. 

I was the first one to know that Ben was gone. He was next to me, all ghost like and haunted and there was too much blood- god, so much blood- for him to be standing upright and not feeling it. He was confused. He looked lost, and too young, and dead. He was undeniably dead. 

I got high so he would leave. And he did.

Loneliness tasted bitter, like activated charcoal. I didn’t mention it around Diego because Diego was the type of person who felt insignificant if you mentioned that you were lonely while he was there. It was something that followed me in his absence because I knew soon, he wouldn’t come back to the courtyard, or I wouldn’t, and we wouldn’t mention it when we saw each other, months later, years later. 

The house was starting to become a corpse with each person that packed their things and left. Always during the part of the day where the sun was the highest and the afternoon had become too sleepy to waste on things like goodbyes. 

I was waiting for Ben. Then I’d leave, in the middle of the night on a whim with only the clothes hanging off of me and a backpack with stray clothes shoved inside and no money- but with Ben.

“I miss him.” 

The sun had started to rise, mango orange reflecting from the looming windows of The Umbrella Academy.

“Me too.” 

Diego left like he came, like a wraith, like an apparition. He didn’t say goodbye because that was Diego-language that he would be here again the next night like he always was. 

I flopped down on the bench that he had been resting against, no bones, and the plastic wrapper over the cigarette case crinkled as I pulled it out of the pocket I had felt Diego slip it into. Sometimes Diego left things in my pockets that cost money that I didn’t have and I’d act like I didn’t notice because he was a sour-patch kid. Sweet and sour. I guessed that was most brothers though, right? The sales tag had already been stripped off with a thumbnail and that too-thin smile came back because I knew how much these things cost, so it was pointless but still nice. 

“I thought you said you were gonna quit those,” came a flat voice near my ear. 

I huffed a choked laugh without looking up, peeling the plastic back. 

“Christ, how long have I been saying that?” 

“At least a year now,” The voice shifted to one side of me. “You should stick to it someday.” 

“Someday,” I promised. 

I didn’t look at him, with the hoody he had died in likely hanging open and black still oozing from the gaping hole in his chest. Instead, I inspected one of his shoes, speckled with a faded red but better than the wound. 

“Took you long enough,” I said.

“I never left,” He said back. “Pretty sure you were the one haunting me, asshole.” 

“I think we should leave. Now that you're here,” I offered, the words hanging in the air too long. 

The sound of pots and pans clunking metallically against each other had started to rise, the sizzling of eggs in a pan following behind it. The familiarness of it ached behind my eyes like a headache. It felt like if I looked over thirteen-year-old Ben would be there, feet not quite reaching the ground and alive. But time was a forest fire. It spread too quickly and made it impossible to go back.

“What about Diego?” Ben questioned after a pause, both of us listening intently for the rustle of Reginald Hargreeves entering the kitchen. 

“I’ll see him again,” I said.

I considered the unlit cigarette carefully before balancing it between my lips, fishing for the lighter that had been weighing against my thigh all night. 

“We didn’t say goodbye.”

**Author's Note:**

> god, it's been over a year (?!) since i wrote any fanfiction. this hyperfixation has been dragging me back into it by the scruff of the neck like i'm a disgruntled kitten


End file.
